Thomas John Watson, Sr.

Keywords: thomas john watson

Thomas John Watson, Sr. (February 17, 1874 – June 19, 1956) was the chairman and CEO of International Business Machines (IBM), who oversaw that company's growth into an international force from 1914 to 1956. Watson developed IBM's distinctive management style and corporate culture, and turned the company into a highly-effective selling organization, based largely around punched card tabulating machines. A leading self-made industrialist, he was one of the richest men of his time and was called the world's greatest salesman when he died in 1956.

Early life and career

Thomas J. Watson was the only son of Thomas and Jane Fulton White Watson. His four older siblings—Jennie, Effie, Loua and Emma—were girls. His father farmed and owned a modest lumber business located near Painted Post, a few miles west of Elmira, in south central New York State. Thomas worked on the family farm in East Campbell, New York and attended the District School Number Five in the late 1870s. As Watson entered his teen years he attended Addison Academy In Addison, New York.

Thomas John Watson Jr.

Having given up his first job—teaching—after just one day, Watson took a year's course in accounting and business at the Miller School of Commerce in Elmira. He left the school in 1891, taking a job at $6 a week as bookkeeper for Clarence Risley's Market in Painted Post. One year later he joined a traveling salesman, George Cornwell, peddling organs and pianos around the farms for William Bronson's local hardware store, Watson's first sales job. When Cornwell left, Watson continued alone, earning $10 per week. After two years of this life, he realized he would be earning $70 per week if he were on a commission. His indignation on making this discovery was such that he quit and moved from his familiar surroundings to the relative metropolis of Buffalo.

Watson then spent a very brief period selling sewing machines for Wheeler and Wilcox. According to Tom Watson, Jr., in his autobiography:

One day my dad went into a roadside saloon to celebrate a sale and had too much to drink. When the bar closed, he found that his entire rig—horse, buggy, and samples—had been stolen. Wheeler and Wilcox fired him and dunned him for the lost property. Word got around, of course, and it took Dad more than a year to find another steady job.

Watson would later enforce strict rules at IBM against alcohol consumption, even off the job. According to Tom Jr.:

This anecdote never made it into IBM lore, which is too bad, because it would have helped explain Father to the tens of thousands of people who had to follow his rules.

Watson's next job was peddling shares of the Buffalo Building and Loan Company for a huckster named C.B. Barron, a showman renowned for his disreputable conduct, which Watson, as a lifelong Methodist, deplored. Barron absconded with the commission and the loan funds. Next Watson opened a butcher shop in Buffalo, which soon failed, leaving Watson with no money, no investment, and no job.

NCR

Watson had a newly-acquired NCR cash register in his butcher shop, for which he had to arrange transfer of the installment payments to the new owner of the butcher shop. On visiting NCR, he met John J. Range and asked him for a job. Determined to join the company, he repeatedly called on Range until, after a number of abortive attempts, he finally was hired in November, 1896, as sales apprentice to Range.

Led by John Patterson, NCR was then one of the leading selling organizations, and John J. Range, its Buffalo branch manager, became almost a father figure for Watson and was a model for his sales and management style. Certainly in later years, in a 1952 interview, he claimed he learned more from Range than anyone else. But at first, he was a poor salesman, until Range took him personally in hand. Then he became the most successful salesman in the East, earning $100 per week.

Four years later, NCR assigned Watson to run the struggling NCR agency in Rochester, New York. As an agent, he got 35% commission and reported directly to Hugh Chalmers, the second-in-command at NCR. In four years Watson made Rochester effectively an NCR monopoly by using the technique of knocking the main competitor, Hallwood, out of business, sometimes resorting to sabotage of the competitors machines. As a reward he was called to the NCR head office in Dayton, Ohio.

Head of IBM

Charles Ranlett Flint who had engineered the merger and creation of the Computing Tabulating Recording Company (CTR) found it difficult to manage and therefore hired Watson as general manager on May 1, 1914 when the company had about 1300 employees. Eleven months later Watson became president of CTR and, within 4 years, doubled its revenues to $9 million. In 1924, he renamed the company International Business Machines. Watson built IBM into such a dominant company that the federal government filed a civil antitrust suit against them in 1952. IBM owned and leased to its customers more than 90 percent of all tabulating machines in the United States at the time. When Watson died in 1956, IBM's revenues were $897 million, and the company had 72,500 employees. Read more »»»

Business term of the day - Term for june 30, 2013: «Acquisition initiation»

Keywords: acquisition initiation

Acquisition Initiation is the initial process within the Information Services Procurement Library (ISPL) and is executed by a customer organization intending to procure Information Services. The process is composed of two main activities: the making of the acquisition goal definition and the making of the acquisition planning. During the acquisition initiation, an iterative process arises in which questions about the goal of the acquisition are usually asked. In response to these questions the Library provides details of the requirements, covering areas such as cost, feasibility and timelines. An example of such requirements is the "planning of the acquisition", a component that may also lead to more questions about the acquisition goal (thus, it is reasonable to state that a relationship exists between the acquisition goal and the acquisition planning).

Source: Wikipedia

J.R. «Jack» Simplot

J.R. Simplot - ENLARGE

John Richard ("Jack" or "J.R.") Simplot (January 4, 1909 – May 25, 2008) was the founder of the J. R. Simplot Company, a Boise, Idaho based agricultural supplier specializing in potato products. In 2007 he was estimated to be the 89th-richest person in America, at $3.6 billion. At the time of his death at age 99 in May 2008, he was the oldest billionaire on the Forbes 400.

Early life

Born in Dubuque, Iowa, in 1909, he was the third of six children of Charles R. and Dorothy Simplot. A year later, the family relocated a thousand miles (1600 km) west to homestead in the newly irrigated Magic Valley of south central Idaho. After differences with his authoritarian father, Simplot quit school in the eighth grade and left home to strike out on his own at age 14 in 1923. He then worked on a farm near Declo, before getting into the potato and vegetable processing business.

J. R. Simplot Company

By World War II, the J. R. Simplot Company had become the largest shipper of fresh potatoes in the nation.

In 1967, Simplot and McDonald's founder Ray Kroc agreed by handshake that the Simplot Company would provide frozen French fries to the restaurant chain. Previously, restaurants had cut potatoes at each location for fresh French fries, but the favored Russet potato was not available for three months in the summer, leading to a quality control problem. Simplot was able to supply frozen Russet potatoes all year long. By 1972, all fries were frozen. The frozen fry deal led to expansion of Simplot potato processing plants and construction in 1977 of a new plant at Hermiston, Oregon. By 2005, Simplot supplied more than half of all French fries for the fast food chain. Simplot also produces fertilizers for agriculture.

Simplot retired as president of his company in 1973, but remained as chairman until 1994. He held the title of Chairman Emeritus until his death in 2008. Simplot received an honorary degree from Utah State University in Logan in 2001, honoring him for his many contributions to the agricultural industry of America, particularly the Intermountain West. Read more »»»

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John D. Rockefeller

Rockefeller, 1885 - ENLARGE

John Davison Rockefeller (July 8, 1839 – May 23, 1937) was an American industrialist and philanthropist. He was the founder of the Standard Oil Company, which dominated the oil industry and was the first great U.S. business trust. Rockefeller revolutionized the petroleum industry and defined the structure of modern philanthropy. In 1870, he founded Standard Oil Company and aggressively ran it until he officially retired in 1897.

Rockefeller founded Standard Oil as an Ohio partnership with his brother William along with Henry Flagler, Jabez Bostwick, chemist Samuel Andrews, and a silent partner, Stephen V. Harkness. As kerosene and gasoline grew in importance, Rockefeller's wealth soared and he became the world's richest man and the first American worth more than a billion dollars.[a] Adjusting for inflation, he is often regarded as the richest person in history.

Rockefeller spent the last 40 years of his life in retirement. His fortune was mainly used to create the modern systematic approach of targeted philanthropy. He was able to do this through the creation of foundations that had a major effect on medicine, education, and scientific research. His foundations pioneered the development of medical research and were instrumental in the eradication of hookworm and yellow fever.

Rockefeller was also the founder of both the University of Chicago and Rockefeller University and funded the establishment of Central Philippine University in the Philippines. He was a devoted Northern Baptist and supported many church-based institutions. Rockefeller adhered to total abstinence from alcohol and tobacco throughout his life. Read more...

Business term of the day - Term for June 28, 2013: "ABC Analysis"

Keywords: abc analysis, selective inventory control

The ABC analysis is a business term used to define an inventory categorization technique often used in materials management. It is also known as Selective Inventory Control. Policies based on ABC analysis:

• A ITEMS: very tight control and accurate records
• B ITEMS: less tightly controlled and good records
• C ITEMS: simplest controls possible and minimal records

The ABC analysis provides a mechanism for identifying items that will have a significant impact on overall inventory cost, while also providing a mechanism for identifying different categories of stock that will require different management and controls.

The ABC analysis suggests that inventories of an organization are not of equal value. Thus, the inventory is grouped into three categories (A, B, and C) in order of their estimated importance.

'A' items are very important for an organization. Because of the high value of these ‘A’ items, frequent value analysis is required. In addition to that, an organization needs to choose an appropriate order pattern (e.g. ‘Just- in- time’) to avoid excess capacity.

'B' items are important, but of course less important, than ‘A’ items and more important than ‘C’ items. Therefore ‘B’ items are intergroup items.

'C' items are marginally important.

Aristotle Socrates Onassi

Onassis, in 1932 - ENLARGE

Aristotle Socrates Onassis (Greek: Αριστοτέλης Ωνάσης, Aristotelis Onasis; 20 January 1906 – 15 March 1975), commonly called Ari or Aristo Onassis, was a prominent Greek shipping magnate.

Onassis was born in Karatass, a suburb of Smyrna (now İzmir, Turkey) to Socrates and Penelope Dologu. Onassis had one full-sister, Artemis, and two half-sisters, Kalliroi and Merope, by his father's second marriage following Penelope's death. Socrates Onassis came from the village of Moutalasski (now named Talas), near Cappadocia in Asia Minor, which is the present-day city of Kayseri, in central Turkey. A successful shipping entrepreneur, he was able to send his children to prestigious schools. At the age of 16, Aristotle Onassis spoke four languages: Greek (his native language), Turkish, Spanish, and English, when he graduated from the local Evangelical Greek School .

After being briefly administered by Greece (1919–1922) in the aftermath of the Allied victory in World War I, Smyrna was re-taken by Turkey and the Onassis family's substantial property holdings were lost, causing them to become refugees fleeing to Greece after the Great Fire of Smyrna. During this period, Aristotle Onassis lost three uncles, an aunt and her husband Chrysostomos Konialidis and their daughter, who were burned to death in a church in Thyatira where 500 Christians were seeking shelter from the Great Fire of Smyrna.

In 1923, Aristotle Onassis left for Buenos Aires, Argentina, by Nansen passport, and got his first job with the British United River Plate Telephone Company.

Business term of the day - Term for June 27, 2013: «Abandonment Rate»

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In marketing, abandonment rate is a term associated with the use of virtual shopping carts. Although shoppers in brick and mortar stores rarely abandon their carts, abandonment of virtual shopping carts is quite common. Marketers can count how many of the shopping carts used in a specified time period result in completed sales versus how many are abandoned. The abandonment rate is the ratio of the number of abandoned shopping carts to the total shopping carts abandoned or to the number of completed transactions.